Notre Dame's memorials: the door and the fountain

1924 – 1986

The ground they stand on: The University of Notre Dame stands in the unincorporated community that bears its name, north of the city line — a boundary this history prints once and then treats plainly: the university's veterans were South Bend's neighbors, classmates and parishioners, and its two great war memorials are part of the county's memorial landscape whatever the map says. The university's own full record lives in the Notre Dame section; here are its memorials.

The World War I Memorial Door, 1924: The cry for a memorial to Notre Dame's part in the Great War began, the University Archives record, shortly after the armistice of 1919. The first thought was to inscribe all 2,500 Notre Dame students, alumni and faculty who had served. What was built instead was architecture: an addition to the east transept of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, designed by the university's architects Francis Kervick and Vincent Fagan, its form approved in January 1923 by a committee of the campus VFW post. On Memorial Day, 30 May 1924, University President the Rev. Matthew Walsh — himself one of the Holy Cross priests who had served as chaplains in Europe — dedicated the memorial and celebrated a military field Mass before it; Walsh dedicated the door, the university magazine records, to the veterans of the World War and of the Civil War both.

Its inscriptions are its record: "Our Fallen Dead" carved at the top of the facade; on the stone lintel, "In Glory Everlasting!"; and above, two carved eagles supporting a shield of the university seal, grasping in their claws a ribbon that reads "God, Country, Notre Dame" — the four words that became the university's signature. In late 1925 two bronze plaques bearing the names of fifty-six Notre Dame servicemen who died in the war were set into the doorposts. Statues of St. Joan of Arc and St. Michael the Archangel took the flanking niches in 1944. For many years the door was the natural place for Mass on Memorial Day and other military occasions, and the university marked its centennial in May 2024. The plaques' list is not perfect: research by two alumni of the class of 1969, John Hickey and South Bend native Darrell Katovsich, finds the century-old roll of fifty-six neither entirely accurate nor complete — a correction the university's own magazine prints, and which this record prints with it.

The Clarke Memorial Fountain, 1986: The second war's dead — and Korea's, and Vietnam's — waited sixty years for their monument, and got a fountain. The Clarke Memorial Fountain, on Fieldhouse Mall west of the Hesburgh Library, was dedicated in 1986 as the university's War Memorial: designed by the architects John Burgee and Philip Johnson, a ring of stone columns of which three are inscribed with the names of the wars they commemorate — "World War II," "Korea," "Vietnam" — for the approximately five hundred Notre Dame alumni who died in those three wars. It is named for the alumnus and benefactor Maude Clarke. Where the door is a roll of fifty-six named dead, the fountain is a memorial without names, to a loss twenty times the size; the two together are the university's whole statement on its twentieth-century wars, and both stand within a few minutes' walk of each other on the campus north of the city line.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame Archives, "World War I Memorial Door" (sites.nd.edu/ndarchives) — the dedication of 30 May 1924 by President Walsh, the Kervick and Fagan design, the January 1923 VFW committee approval, the 2,500 who served, the inscriptions from the Scholastic of May 1924, and the door's years as the place of Memorial Day Mass.
2. Notre Dame Magazine, "A Century Later, Mysteries Remain about WWI Memorial Door" (2024) — the fifty-six names on the plaques of late 1925, the statues of 1944, Walsh's dedication to the veterans of both wars, and the Hickey–Katovsich finding that the roll is neither entirely accurate nor complete; ThinkND, Notre Dame Senior Alumni (2024) — the centennial observance.
3. Clarke Memorial Fountain, reference record — the 1986 dedication, the Burgee and Johnson design, the three inscribed columns, the approximately 500 alumni dead of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, the Fieldhouse Mall site and the Maude Clarke naming.